My name is Jessica. These posts were formally the diaries of my cooking experiences and fun in the kitchen. It was endearingly called, Novice Cook Diaries.
However, life has gotten more complicated since I started this blog and I’ve decided that my novice status has reached farther heights as a new wife, new mother and…still…. novice cook in the kitchen.
So now, this little place will be just as much about the cooking as it is about wife-ing and mothering and all the new things I’m learning in those spaces too.
The Cook: I have no training in the kitchen other then what I’ve learned from my mom, the food network, cook books and a knife skills class that I took many moons ago. I love experimenting with different recipes and forcing myself to be creative with ingredients I find in the kitchen. Being on a tight budget forces some of that creativity and my hope is that one day I will have a larger food budget that allows me to buy some yummier ingredients to experiment with! I’m currently working through an old New Years resolution to cook through Deb Perelman’s, “The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook.” Her novice, start-in-your-own-kitchen begining inspired me and felt appropriate to learn from in my own tiny kitchen. So, most of the blog posts you’ll see about cooking will be coming from the pages of her cookbook :) Very Julie and Julia style!
The Wife: Guys I’m feeling very new to this whole “wife” world. I got married June 24, 2016 and while that doesn’t exactly make me a newlywed, it still makes me newer at being a wife then most things in life. We got pregnant in the first 3 months of our marriage so our whole first year wasn’t really about our marriage as much as it was about figuring some of our stuff out before we became parents! Yikes! So, our first year was full and punctuated by baby classes, birthing classes, marriage conferences, and parenting seminars. Needless to say, I’m very new to this whole marriage journey and I really feel it most days. I am learning what selfless means in a much deeper way and I can’t say it is the most fun journey I’ve ever been on….but it’s good. Really good :) Most days….haha.
The Mother: My daughter was born July 3, 2017. If you’re doing the math you’ll realize that it was 1 week after our first anniversary. *sigh* Sooooo….new wife…new mom…and new identity. Basically :) It’s been quite the whirlwind into motherhood and while I’m grateful I have an amazing baby girl who has been easy to figure out, I’m still figuring out my new pace, and always worried about the next phase she’s going to enter and how I can be prepared for it so it doesn’t cause me to stress or fall apart with the daily unknowns. Which means….I over read and over prepare for it since life would be over if I wasn’t prepared for the next hard thing to come along! (read sarcastically with a drop or 2 of reality). So, while I’m new to this whole thing, I’m also learning a lot all the time and hope to use this space to unpack some of what I’m learning along the way about myself as a mother, my daughter as a kiddo, and the whole parent/child, mother/daughter relationship dynamic that freaks me out most days.
I am doing this blog as a hobby but would absolutely love to gain a little audience that interacts with the blog and offers a little coaching/advice on all the areas I discuss from cooking , motherhood and marriage…I would love to learn from your experiences and expertise because I clearly don’t have it all figured out! So, if you want to leave a few tips and tricks of your own on these pages, you are very welcome to!
Write back soon!
Jessica May
The Novice Life 